Search

The jazz group Mostly Other People Do The Killing is recording Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and The Jazz Times asked: “What’s Your Take?”

My take? Why bother? If you want to hear Kind of Blue, there’s plenty of ways to hear Miles Davis and his group do it.

I don’t get the point of cover bands or tributes. They’re music’s version of decaffeinated coffee or non-alcoholic beer. The real thing is better and has the intended impact.

Good for MOPDK if they want to play Kind of Blue, and good for the group for bringing attention to the album. But why settle for a copy when you can get the original?

Said Quincy Jones, according to Ashley Kahn’s book on the album, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece: “I play Kind of Blue every day—it’s my orange juice. It still sounds like it was made yesterday.”

You think Jones wants some artificial orange drink instead? Kind of Blue is 55 years old. If Quincy Jones hears the copy rather than Miles, he’ll be likely to spit out whatever he’s drinking as if it was 55 years old.

It may be that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And that the album is meant as tribute. But if they copy it note for absolute note, timed to the tenth of a second, it’s no more jazz than Kenny G. Doesn’t that miss the point of the music?

I’m not sure how Miles would feel about it, whether he’d be flattered or slighted.

My guess? He’d turn his back on it.

That’s good enough for me.

The link above is to All Blues, song one on side two of the album. From allmusic.com: “‘All Blues’ was a live staple throughout much of Davis’ career, and it’s easy to see why – the tune is built upon the melodic brilliance of Davis’ trumpet, which even Coltrane fails to upstage during his solo. ‘All Blues’ is also a testament to Jimmy Cobb’s light, fluid drumming, a rather unsung hero of the Kind of Blue sessions, but a most vital member of the group.”

Like this:

Idris Muhammad died last month at age 74 and the bassist Christian McBride asked shortly thereafter: “Does anyone realize what a true drum hero this man was?”

Apparently not, if the dearth of news — from points other than Muhammad’s native New Orleans — was any indication.

The careers of some jazz musicians, like Dave Brubeck and Charlie Haden, are appropriately celebrated. Others, like Muhammad, are barely acknowledged widely, the acclaim faint, like a note not played loudly enough.

Muhammad was 16, and still known as Leo Morris when he played with Fats Domino on Blueberry Hill. In the next half century he accompanied scores of jazz musicians, led his own band, delved into funk and R&B, produced Turn This Mutha Out and grew to appreciate hip-hop, according to an interview Muhammad did with waxpoetics.com.

“Even though hip-hop musicians appropriate your music? And you’re not necessarily getting paid for it?,” he was asked by interviewer Eothen Alapatt.

Answered Muhammad: “It don’t really belong to me, man; I’m only the creator. If you take something I create, and you do something with it, then someone else will take it and move it to another stage. And this is what happened with hip-hop. This is in my aura. I’m doing stuff for people to put out there so people can grab it. The gift the Creator has given me, I can’t be selfish with. If I keep it in my pocket, it’s not going to go anyplace. It doesn’t matter if a guy stole from me. I’d say, ‘Well, what did you do? Okay, let me show you this.’ This is how I live.”

The New Orleans radio host George Ingmire said he’d put Muhammad on his “Mount Rushmore of New Orleans drummers along with Smokey Johnson, Johnny Vidacovich and Herlin Riley,” according to nola.com

It might be worth checking the other three out, especially since New Orleans gave us Muhammad, and in no particular order Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, the Marsalises and Louis Armstrong. Muhammad said in the waxpoetics.com interview his father played his banjo with the latter.

Said Muhammad, in an interview with waxpoetics.com, on his music: “Well, you see, man, it don’t belong to us. Secretly, whatever you have is gonna come out anyhow. If you think you are hiding something—you have a private vault that you have stuff in—when you leave this world your wife is going to open it up and sell everything. She’s gonna sell everything in that vault! It’s gonna come out anyway. So why not be free with it while you’re here and share it with other people? ’Cause it don’t belong to you.”

Kabsha, the cut above, is from Muhammad’s 1980 album of the same name. From the review by allmusic.com’s Scott Yanow: “Muhammad, who had often been heard in funky or more commercial settings, really excels in this sparse setting, showing off what he learned from hearing bands in his native New Orleans.”

Blogroll

Featured Posts

My better half is gone for three days, and who can blame her: the wind from outside is louder than the clarinet from the digital device inside. But this means that she can’t critique what’s on the CD player from 1,000 miles away, and that Don Byron’s Tuskegee Experiments, which met with less than positive […]

I’m about 70 pages into Joe Posnanski’s book The Soul of Baseball, which is about a year spent traveling and listening to Buck O’Neil, whose two great loves were jazz and baseball. “Buck always said the two greatest things in this world are baseball and jazz,” Posnanski wrote, and if Buck was wrong, it’s not […]

I don’t understand the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and with every year it makes less and less sense. At least the baseball Hall of Fame has standards. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has ambiguity. What is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s equivalent of 500 home runs or 300 wins? […]

A local public radio station has spent the last few week promoting a contest to determine the greatest year in music, a silly if fun exercise trying to measure that which is unmeasurable. Their on-air, and maybe off-, personalities have volleyed back and forth, like dueling jazz saxophonists trying to woo the audience, on whether […]

Steely Dan is in town tonight, which you’d know if you listened to the oldies station. If you’re a longtime fan, that should be as arresting as the first notes of Kid Charlemagne. Steely Dan, which once sang about the most unsavory of characters, is now promoted on the most normal of stations. It’s as […]